Movement as Part of Creative Practice

Physical activity is the flip side of the coin to creative work.

I’ve noticed that the most creative people I know have a physical activity that they regularly practice. I know musicians who run, writers who do yoga, visual artists who hike. I personally love to take walks. When I ask my coaching clients to describe how their creative practice fits into their life, many talk about their physical exercise as something that is at odds with their creative practice. Exercise is often a priority for them because of its physical and mental health benefits, but they don’t generally see it as directly related to their creative practice. I encourage them to see physical activity as a part of their creative practice, the flip side of the coin to doing dedicated creative work.

The reason so many creative people have a physical practice is that movement actually makes you more creative. Most people don’t consciously understand this connection. They may think that the elevated mood generated by exercise is conducive to getting their creative work done, because it’s easier to do stuff when you’re feeling good. But actually, this isn’t the reason exercise enhances your creativity. That endorphin high from exercise is a parallel benefit to enhanced creativity but is not causally related to it. The exercise itself is what makes you more creative.

Creatives through the ages have used physical activity as a component of their creative practice, even if they do not explicitly frame it as such. The American Transcendentalist writers Emerson and Thoreau were well-known for their lengthy nature walks. Thoreau walked, or “sauntered,” as he called it, for at least four hours a day. He identified it as a spiritual practice, but the way he saw spirituality is very much how we see creativity today: as an understanding of life that arises as we gaze through the lens of our inner selves at the outside world. The Transcendentalist perspective emerged in part as a reaction to the development of empirical science that posited that the world can only be known through our observations of the material realm.

The Transcendentalists understood that an intuitive experience of the world is essential to the flourishing of the creative soul. Thoreau intentionally used his sauntering habit as a way to harmonize his body and mind and thus elicit creative thinking. In fact, he did not believe that a mind could be properly inspired unless the body was, too*, making physical activity both advantageous for and integral to creative thought.

Ironically, empirical science now backs that up. Numerous studies have shown the benefits exercise has on creative thinking (this NYT article has a good summation of them). However, some types of physical activity do serve creativity better than others. It is not a coincidence that creatives generally prefer solitary or semi-solitary types of exercise: running, yoga, hiking. Team sports, where your mind is engaged with the other players around you and the strategy of the game, are not conducive to creative thought because they focus your mind too much on the outward circumstances of the game. The goal with a physical activity as part of your creativity practice is to soothe your mind into a state where its subconscious cognitive processes switch on. These are where creativity is born and develops. Thoreau saw this method of unfocused yet guided cognition as thinking with “carelessness.”†

I encourage you to see your physical activities as part of your creative practice. Even activities like gardening count. The only requirement is that they be the type of activity that doesn’t require too much active focus on your part, so that you can give your brain the space to activate its subconscious, intuitive thought processes. Creativity thrives when we expand our perception of what counts as creative work. It’s not just the moments we sit down and start doing our creative work. There is so much that goes on behind the scenes in our brains to make those moments of “performance” possible, and you will reap the benefits if you give your brain the space and time it needs to fully access its creative potential. Integrating your physical activities into your perception of what comprises creative practice is one way to do this.

*This and other insights related to Thoreau were inspired by David C. Smith, 1991, “Walking as Spiritual Discipline: Henry Thoreau and the Inward Journey” in Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 74:1/2, 129-140. You can find the article here. It is not open access, but you can sign up to the database (JSTOR) using your personal email and read up to 100 articles a month for free.

† Ibid., 134.